CyberSecurity Institute – Page 61 – Security News Curated from across the world

HP Updates ArcSight Portfolio With Security Analytics

Posted on July 19, 2013December 30, 2021 by admini

“Typically batch in nature, big data analytics allows an organization to organize and analyze vast amounts of structured and unstructured information to facilitate the detection of rogue employees, partners or criminal or collusive rings of fraudulent or abusive activity,” Avivah Litan, an analyst at IT research firm Gartner, said in a statement. “Adversaries only need to get it right once to invoke serious damage on an organization’s private data, ability to provide critical service or corporate reputation,” Haiyan Song, vice president and general manager of ArcSight, Enterprise Security Products for HP, said in a statement. “With solutions designed to enhance threat detection through improved security analytics for big data, HP enables customers to quickly identify potential attackers and take action proactively to minimize business impact and prevent disruption to critical client services.”

With the launch of IdentityView 2.5, HP has expanded the number of users that a single instance can monitor by 10 times, an enhancement designed to help organizations correlate security incident and event data across an expansive user base to reduce insider threat risk.

“With a mission to provide superior health care, it is critical that we prevent system disruptions that might impact patient safety or quality of care,” Keith Duemling, information security officer at Lake Health, said in a statement. “By automating threat detection across our network, HP ArcSight allowed us to move to a much more proactive approach to information security and improve our ability to detect risks that might affect overall system performance by a factor of 10.”

Link: http://www.eweek.com/small-business/hp-updates-arcsight-portfolio-with-security-analytics/

Big banks staged mega-cyberattack drill last Thursday

Posted on July 18, 2013December 30, 2021 by admini

An employee sitting at his desk might get a prompt saying, “this bank is having integrity issues with money,” or “you cant make trades over this technical system.” The employee then might role-play talking to an FBI agent — likely an actual one enlisted to help with the drill, said Dave Aitel, CEO of the security firm Immunity, who formerly worked as a research scientist for the National Security Agency.

The financial sector is hoping to prepare itself for a massive, disruptive attack — a growing concern lately, as “hacktivists,” organized cybercriminals and government-spnosored attacks become increasingly large and successful. Though still a far-off doomsday scenario, some security industry experts say the financial sector is vulnerable to cyber-terrorists aiming to damage the U.S. economy. That’s because banks and other financial institutions have to do deal with money flows in real time, with markets hanging in the balance.

Though some skeptical security experts dismissed Quantum Dawn as a PR stunt, SIFMA said the first run was useful in uncovering flaws in the industry’s cyberattack protocols. The trade group found that banks were largely good at sharing information with one another, but bad at making real-time critical decisions for mitigating the threats.

Link: http://money.cnn.com/2013/07/18/technology/security/bank-cyberattack/index.html

Security company to release testing tool for SAP mobile access

Posted on July 17, 2013December 30, 2021 by admini

Exposing those back-end systems is complicated, and companies can face a risk of hacking if the systems are misconfigured or do not have up-to-date patches.

Sanjay Poonen, head of SAP’s mobile division, said at the Sapphire Now conference in May that the company has more than 1,000 people working on mobile-related projects in areas such as retail, banking and consumer package goods.

Last year, SAP reported more than €222 million (US$293 million) in license revenue from its mobile-related business, a revenue stream that didn’t exist two and half years prior, Poonen said.

Nunez said companies faces risks if, for example, a CRM (customer relationship management) system is incorrectly configured for access by mobile devices, opening a door for hackers using attack tools for Web services.

X1’s mobile security module looks at what functions and processes are exposed in the back-end systems and not on the mobile application itself, Nunez said.

Link: http://m.itworld.com/security/365487/security-company-release-testing-tool-sap-mobile-access

As cyber attacks detonate, banks gird for battle

Posted on July 17, 2013December 30, 2021 by admini

JPMorgan and its peers like Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo have signed up for Thursday’s drill, which is being organized by Wall Street’s biggest trade group, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, or SIFMA.

They’ll monitor a simulated stock exchange for irregular trading and will be pressed to figure out what’s going on and how to react while sharing information with regulators and each other.

But that was before a wave of cyberattacks last fall, when big banks were forced to temporarily shut down their websites after attackers bombarded them with traffic — akin to overwhelming a phone line with too many calls.

“If you went to banks three years ago, and said, ‘What are your top five risks?’, probably none of them would put cyber on there,” said Karl Schimmeck, SIFMA’s vice president for financial services operations.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which regulates national banks, recently held a call with community bankers to warn them that they’re not free from danger either: Since September, attacks have been increasingly aimed at businesses with fewer than 250 employees, the OCC says. Customers would have to go through certain steps to get their money back, like filing a claim, showing that they weren’t negligently tossing their account information around and giving the bank time to investigate.

A DRILL BY ANY OTHER NAME: As for the title of Thursday’s drill, the one that sounds more appropriate for an action movie than a bank security exercise, it came about during the creation of the original drill in 2011, which was organized by the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council.

Link: http://www.seattlepi.com/business/technology/article/As-cyber-attacks-detonate-banks-gird-for-battle-4667972.php

Business users visit most malicious websites, security academics find

Posted on July 16, 2013December 30, 2021 by admini

Just 2 per cent of malicious websites visited by Australian users were actually hosted in Australia, while 62 per cent originated in the United States – lending support to earlier reports that notorious malware host China was actually losing its one-time dominance.

The project “allows us to apply large scale analytics techniques to analyse massive volumes of Trend Micro malware sensor data,” said Professor Yang Xiang, director of the Network Security and Computing Lab within the Deakin University School of Information Technology, in a statement.

Interestingly, many of the hosts were unaware of their infection with malware: of 24 servers compromised by the Blackhole Exploit Kit and noted by the research team, 12 were still delivering the malware-compromised pages a week later.

Link: http://www.cso.com.au/article/520498/business_users_visit_most_malicious_websites_security_academics_find/

Study: Network Reconnaissance On Rise Posing Computer Threat

Posted on July 12, 2013December 30, 2021 by admini

Automated credential guessing is a malicious attack in which the perpetrator uses software to guess log-in credentials of users and can inherit user specific privileges to the system, based on the identity established by the supplied credentials.

Findings show that while most companies place security emphasis on computer viruses, trojans and worms, security breaches as a result of viruses account for less than one percent of incidents. Port scanning and automated credential guessing are by far the most prevalent types of IT network security breaches among remote locations and branch offices. Remote locations typically do not have the level of security oversight and resources as a large, centralized corporate network location to combat these threats.

“Our recommendation to businesses is to apply the appropriate IT security protocols and technology that mitigate the risk of network vulnerabilities.”

Link: http://mitechnews.com/articles.asp?id=15851&sec=24